Good morning! It’s the best working day of the year! The kids are back in school, the leaves are turning brown, and the Eagles are about to start their season with a rookie quarterback. I’m a sick motherfucker and welcome the return to normalcy, to the grind, to… continuing to blog from my underwear with no discernible change in lifestyle because I rarely leave the house anyway.

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What a disappointment this free agency period was for both the Flyers and Sixers. Sure, neither team mortgaged the future to sign the soup du jour and set the franchise back decades, the way Paul Holmgren would’ve done or the way we feared Bryan Colangelo would do. But still, specifically with regards to the Sixers, there were ostensibly plenty of opportunities to round out the roster with veteran guards and mid-level free agents able to stabilize the tank and put Sixers prospects into a competitive situation almost from day one. But nope, we got Jerryd Bayless – a decent-shooting guard who won’t take the ball out of Ben Simmons’ hands – and that Y which is going to bother me for a long tyme. We got Sergio Rodriguez, a point guard from Spain who had previously bounced around the league a bunch. He, like Bayless, won’t take much away from Ben Simmons. Cool? There’s nothing to hate here, but landing someone like Allen Crabbe or Seth Curry, or even Harrison Barnes, would’ve done a lot more to put a respectable product on the floor next season without breaking the bank or usurping the standing of Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid.

The theory going around, first posited by Spike Eskin, is this:

So far Bryan Colangelo is sneak processing while leaking how much they want to win now to keep the wolves at bay. Cunning. I respect it.

Hard to argue there. All we’ve heard about is the MAN OF ACTION, how Colangelo was going to wheel and deal and assemble a winner… and all he’s done so far is make the sort of minor moves to keep the tank alive, and even drafted two Hinkie-esque European players late in the first round.

There’s nothing to hate about what Colangelo’s done so far, but it’s hard not to be just a little disappointed that there was one even quasi-notable signing.

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Gooooooooooooooooooood morning, Philadelphia! Summer vacation is over, the kids are heading back to school, and everyone is back in the office, chained to desks until after the last drop of snow falls sometime in March. Today is easily one of my favorite days of the year. I’ve been walking around the house proclaiming it Work Christmas and now I think Mrs. CB wants a divorce before even three months of marriage. I feel like the dad in that Most Wonderful Time of Year Staples commercial from a few years back. Yeah, yeah, I know everyone hates today, and I feel you, but the Eagles’ season is just five days away, the Flyers are slowly starting to migrate back into town, the Phillies just thew a no-hitter, and the webnets are aflood – aflood! – with naked pictures of your favorite celebrities– Kate Upton’s saggy breasts, JLaw(!), a haggard-looking Kirsten Dunst, and Justin Verlander’s floppy penis.*

*Can someone please tell me why he doesn’t have any foreskin? One of the great mysteries of our time will forever be “Why doesn’t Justin Verlander have foreskin? And why is Kate Upton seemingly OK with this?”

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The roundup:

The Phillies pitched a no-hitter yesterday! And no one cares. I know it’s a combined no-hitter and not nearly as big of a deal, but boy is everyone nonchalant about it. When I told my dad (who loves no-hitters more than anything in sports) about it yesterday, he responded with a euphoric meh. This is what the Phillies have done to us. A Labor Day no-hitter against the Braves and no one gives a shit. Think I’m kidding? Philly.com this morning:

It’s second fiddle to conjecturing Eagles stories and slightly more important than a two-years-from-now Sixer taking an elbow from Andres Nocioni. Fun times.

In many ways, hockey has been considered to be lagging behind the other three so-called “major” sports. The use of advanced metrics is one of those cases since baseball, football and basketball have used them for quite some time.

There is, however, a point of going overboard.

“Absolutely,” Hextall said. “Hockey’s not a static game. Baseball is. Baseball, I think it can be used as more of a tool. I think hockey might get there, but we’ve got work to do.”

I think that’s a great way of describing it. Baseball lends itself to analytics because every play has a measurable result. That’s not the case in hockey. Way more intangibles that are difficult to quantify. I mean, is there a stat for beating the shit out of a man and it turning around the season, Ray Emery? Probably not.